Why American Culture Is So Unsettling

Why American Culture Is So Unsettling – When I recently spoke with Noam Chomsky on the Current Affairs podcast, I didn’t expect him to start his answer by saying, “Let me tell you about one of the scariest experiences of my life.” nuclear, and I mentioned the strange indifference that Americans often show toward the suffering of non-Americans.
The “bad experience” that Chomsky describes is something that might seem very ordinary: he and his wife had gone to see a film in Boston in the early 1950s. The film is about the bombing of Hiroshima and what made the experience so unsettling for Chomsky that he recounts with horror even now at the age of 93, was that when he arrived at the cinema he noticed that the film was being presented as an exploitation film, playing in a theater that regularly shows pornography. (There are many genres of real-life atrocity footage presented for entertainment.) When images of Japanese civilians being scalped played on the screen, the American public laughed hysterically as if they were watching Charlie Chaplin or the Marx Brothers.

 

Why American Culture Is So Unsettling

surlerythme – For Chomsky, this experience was deeply troubling because it showed that his fellow Americans could be so insensitive to the suffering of others that they could look at images of the worst imaginable atrocities and be satisfied. See this as a total deficiency. Empathy between normal people and “freedom-loving” people is terrible. There is one thing that makes people not understand what it means for their country to abandon nuclear weapons against civilians. Being able to see the results and laugh is another level of depravity.

In our interview, I also asked Chomsky if he remembered where he was when he learned of the bombing of Hiroshima itself. He said he remembers the moment well: He was a young counselor at summer camp and was told that the United States had just destroyed a Japanese city with atomic bombs. Chomsky said he felt a “double terror”: first realizing that we are now in an age where cities could be destroyed by nuclear weapons, and then seeing the reaction of the people around him in the camp: almost they reacted and went back in time. game quickly.

Chomsky has published more than 100 books, and one of his recurring themes is Americans‘ tragic apathy toward the consequences of our actions on non-Americans. The invasion and occupation of South Vietnam killed millions of Vietnamese, but this is still seen in the country as a noble mistake. The current Biden administration is starving the Afghan people. This is rarely talked about in the media and therefore no one seems to care.

 

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If you are a person who is sensitive to the suffering of others and does not differentiate morally between Americans and non-Americans, the United States may seem like a very bad place. Donald Trump could be re-elected president, even though his climate policies (which could be reduced to using as many fossil fuels as possible) would bring death and chaos to the world. The architects of the Iraq War, from public intellectual Bill Kristol to George W. Bush himself, were considered respectable and even moderate. Ronald Reagan, regularly voted America’s best president, “turned Central America into a battlefield.”

One problem is that the United States is geographically isolated from most of the countries affected by its foreign policy decisions, a kind of cocoon in which most people never see the consequences of bombing a city. Despite the violence in American family life – police killings, prisons, shootings – the nation’s cities have never been as ravaged by war as many others. Maybe that’s why he doesn’t really understand the extent of the horror implied by phrases like “children killed by drone strikes.” Even when the media covers the consequences of foreign policy, the images broadcast are carefully censored so as not to unduly disturb the people of Central America, Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, etc. he becomes a distant, abstract other person whose pain is unfelt.

In the media, there is a simple hierarchy of life in which victims of crime and natural disasters in Europe and America receive more attention than lives in Africa, Asia and Latin America. American politics and drug use have fueled horrific violence on the Mexican border, but the events taking place across the border might as well be taking place on a distant planet, given all the attention they receive in the American press.

One of the most important facts in understanding cruelty is that to the person who commits it, it often doesn’t seem like cruelty at all. Chomsky quotes a passage from John Stuart Mill, who condemned violent interference by other countries in world affairs, but considered the British Empire to be an exception and that Britain was an angelic nation whose colonial conquests were carried out in the interests of the colonized.

Chomsky notes that even if John Stuart Mill, the most morally sophisticated intellectual of his time, could not understand the dehumanizing racist myths used to rationalize imperial occupation, we can understand why contemporary American intellectuals described by Chomsky as “unfit to shine Mill’s shoes”

In fact, if you are not part of a group that experiences certain acts of subjugation and oppression, it can be very difficult to look to past history to justify that subjugation and oppression, or to find ugly facts that are kept out of the mainstream. Americans don’t really understand the truth about what our country has done in Vietnam and Central America, not to mention Afghanistan and Iraq, because the British generally think of their empire as something glorious to be proud of. Most of us don’t encounter people like, for example, mutilated victims of US bombings in Laos in our daily lives, so no one thinks about it.

 

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One of the reasons why reading Chomsky changed my life as a teenager was because he helped me see the world and my country with fresh eyes – the eyes of someone who valued every life equally and he wondered how America would act towards them. found. “the other side”. When you start thinking like that, things that many people consider normal end up looking really disturbing. For example, here is a picture of a training camp for American soldiers sent to Vietnam:

As you can see, the sign contains a horrifically racist caricature of a Vietnamese man being shot. But for soldiers, this sign is commonplace. This did not scare them, or if it did, it did not prevent them from continuing their journey. (American soldiers were systematically trained to dehumanize Vietnamese people, to the point where they routinely used racial slurs instead of the word “Vietnamese.”)

Chomsky once quoted a disturbing passage from the textbooks his children received in school, in a year in which the Pequot massacre was described as a harmless, even interesting, event in American history. I actually found an old copy of the book (Exploring New England, 1961) so I could see it for myself. In this book, a boy named Robert, being taken on a tour of New England history, hears about the massacre and thinks, “I wish I were a man and I had been there.” generations, with the extraordinary violence of European colonialism simply excluded from history education.

Since the 1960s, when members of marginalized groups rose up and began demanding that issues such as black women and women’s history be taken seriously, there have been successful efforts to correct that propaganda, by telling “the history of a society that is home to thieves and thieves.” slaves were not”. The hero of the 1619 Project, for example, was an attempt to tell the truth about ugly and racist aspects of American history and to teach the history of a country that considered black lives as important as white lives. It’s interesting that such a rather bland effort to show the basic facts of what happened was met with backlash from right-wing groups The Trump administration launched the 1776 Project in a desperate attempt to keep history clean.